The Android Distribution Numbers for October are out, and while there’s a swing towards the more recent versions of Android, there’s still one big question hanging over the release: Where’s the Pie?
Google released Android 9.0 (Pie) in August, yet two months later there’s still no Android Pie in the distribution numbers. Android 9.0 is now running on Pixel devices, as well as the Essential phone, a smattering of Nokia phones and the Sony Xperia XZ3 as well as a few Beta releases – and yet there’s no mention of it yet.
Now that rant is out of the way, on the whole the shift in Android version distribution is on a turn towards more modern versions of Android with those numbers cutting into earlier versions. After a fairly static run for a while Gingerbread dropped to 0.2%, and the rest either remained static or dropped right up to Android 8.0/8.1 (Oreo) which saw an increase of over 2%.
We’ll hopefully see a bit more about Pie in the near future, with a number of handsets announced this month with Android Pie onboard launching in November perhaps we’ll finally see what Android 9.0 is doing.
For your convenience, here’s the last few months data for comparison:
| Android Version | August 2018 | September 2018 | October 2018 |
| Android 2.3.3 – 2.3.7 (Gingerbread) | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.2% |
| Android 4.0.3 – 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.3% |
| Android 4.1.x (JellyBean) | 1.2% | 1.1% | 1.1% |
| Android 4.2.x (JellyBean) | 1.8% | 1.6% | 1.5% |
| Android 4.3 (JellyBean) | 0.5% | 0.5% | 0.4% |
| Android 4.4 (KitKat) | 8.6% | 7.8% | 7.6% |
| Android 5.0 (Lollipop) | 3.8% | 3.6% | 3.5% |
| Android 5.1 (Lollipop) | 15.4% | 14.7% | 14.4% |
| Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) | 22.7% | 21.6% | 21.3% |
| Android 7.0 (Nougat) | 20.3% | 19.0% | 18.1% |
| Android 7.1 (Nougat) | 10.5% | 10.3% | 10.1% |
| Android 8.0 (Oreo) | 11.4% | 13.4% | 14.0% |
| Android 8.1 (Oreo) | 3.2% | 5.8% | 7.5% |
I would have expected the increasing use of Android Go – which tends to get updated swiftly – would have increased the Android Pie share.
But why on earth do people continue to purchase phones from manufacturers that then abandon them and don’t update the OS?